The present invention is related to virtual space in a virtual world, and more specifically to automatic increasing of capacity of a virtual space in a virtual world.
Virtual reality (VR) worlds bring the best of online and real-world brick and mortar to many scenarios, for example shopping. In the brick and mortar worlds, shopping has both a social and a visually immersive experience. Two dimensional (2D) shopping web sites are convenient (e.g., they do not require traveling to a physical location) and scalable to 1,000s of users by a hosting server. However, they lack that social and visual experience of brick and mortar. Today three dimensional (3D) web sites combine the convenience of online shopping with the social and the visual benefits of brick and mortar. However, they suffer from the scalability issue of brick and mortar.
Current virtual worlds, (e.g., Second Life), differ from traditional 2D web sites in many ways. One way is that if you are looking at a page on the Circuit City® web site, you don't know if you are the only one looking at that page or if there are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of other users looking at that page at the same time. In virtual worlds, to see something you must be in a particular location to view it. When there are too many avatars in a particular location at the same time, it creates congestion not just for the user who has to attempt to move around all the other avatars, but also for the server that is running that particular virtual space in the virtual world. Therefore, if someone is running a store in a virtual world, they may only want to allow a certain number of avatars in at a time to facilitate a good shopping and user experience as well as control the load on the server running that store. However, a problem exists in that if the store is full, the next avatar desiring access to the store has to be turned away. Currently, one solution to this problem is that when a virtual world store effectively closes, the avatar is put on a waiting list to enter. This is unacceptable to users who will not want to be denied.